To start, I grew up building PC's back in the plug-n-pray days. Shopping around for the brand new Pentium II was a ton of fun, and building your rig to play Unreal and/or Ultima was an awesome experience. For some reason, I skipped playing Half-Life - unheard of for PC builders of the time. Fast forward to, well, today, and I finally played beat Half-Life (1), even though I beat Half-Life 2 in 2004 [didn't play the first and didn't understand anything]. After playing HL1, I feel like I don't really understand how HL2 comes to play.

So I understand that I, Gordon Freeman, opened a giant craphole portal allowing creatures from Xen into Earth. The thing that confuses me is that Black Mesa was already testing portals to Xen, and bringing specimens through already. So why was the resonance cascade necessary? Also when you're trying to escape, the game makes you think you are going to be some savior of all of the people in the lambda complex. Yeah... all, 3 of them? I remember playing through HL2 and the lambda was an important theme. Also, where can you truly get the story of HL2? Other than Breen's mind-numbing rants over the City 17 speakers, how do you actually know what the hell is going on?

Am I the only one who finds the story confusing? It's interesting yes - and most definitely fun. But I want to make sure that I'm understanding what all is going on so that I can feel the hype of HL:E3. Please keep spoilers out of this, I'm mainly needing some sort of help explaining the gap between 1 and 2.